This Day in History

June 30, 1945

"First Draft of Report on EDVAC" Published

"First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC," is published. Brian Randell notes, "It is generally accepted that the first documented discussion ... of the advantages of using just one large internal memory, in which instructions as well as data could be held, was the draft report on EDVAC written by Von Neumann." In 1944, he was appointed a consultant to the EDVAC project. The draft report contains a description of the planned machine and the reasoning behind the various design decisions.